Economy

Kathleen Brooks, a research director at FOREX.com, told CNBC that classification by the German government gave bitcoin legitimacy to be used as a settlement currency in one of the world's largest economies. She said this was a big step forward for the bitcoin movement.

Linked to their currency debasement is the growing current account deficit. In an attempt to solve this, the country issued several sanctions to discourage their currency flowing into gold. We described for instance in Indian Government Desperately Tries To Discourage Gold Demand several import taxes. More recently, Indian officials increased the gold import duty to 10%. Needless to say that gold imports have almost frozen in the past couple of weeks.

This is similar to what China did in 1999 when it created four such companies to try to clean the balance sheets of its four big state-owned banks prior to opening up the sector with World Trade Organization (WTO) entry in 2001.

And yes, some of our freedoms really are being eroded -- our government is at war with critical thought, the "NSA-North" is in full swing, and terrorism is being used as a mechanism for power consolidation. But it's highly presumptuous to lump it all together as "Orwellian." Especially considering Orwell himself would have been hesitant to equate any modern political structure -- even 20th century fascism, with something as penetratingly tyrannical as Big Brother.

Though there are plenty of other reasons to doubt the claims about Spraberry/Wolfcamp, no one will know for certain what's true until the area is drilled and produced. But, in order to drill it, oil and gas companies must raise billions in capital to pay for drilling and production costs. And, in order to do that, they have to get investors interested in ploughing money into the drilling of actual individual wells through what are called private placements.

Richard Hilton, the CEO of Ceres, who have also been researching methods to remove the expensive acid treatment phase of biofuel production, commented that by eliminating the acid phase, the cost of converting the cellulose into usable sugars could fall by as much as $1 a gallon.

The repository stores samples from sheep, turkeys, goats, bison, pigs, elk, chickens, fish and cows. Every straw has a story. There are 30,000 salmon milt samples, obtained from the Nez Perce tribe in Idaho. There’s rare sheep semen from Kazakhstan, near sheep’s center of domestication. There’s even a full backup of 20,000 exclusively bred cows on the Island of Jersey, progenitors for Jersey cattle all over the globe.

The researchers found that parts of the Yellow River delta are dropping by up to 25 centimeters a year, probably because of groundwater extraction for onshore fish tanks. The link between aquaculture and subsidence has attracted little international notice. “This is a new one on me,” says Stephen Brown, a fisheries scientist at the US National Marine Fisheries Service in Silver Spring, Maryland. “We are concerned about the effect of sea-level rise on fish; not the other way around,” he says.

Gold & Silver

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